Shape separation of gold nanorods using centrifugation

Abstract

We demonstrate the use of centrifugation for efficient separation of colloidal gold nanorods from a mixture of nanorods and nanospheres. We elucidate the hydrodynamic behavior of nanoparticles of various shapes and illustrate that the shape-dependent drag causes particles to have shape-dependent sedimentation behavior. During centrifugation, nanoparticles undergo Brownian motion under an external field and move with different sedimentation velocities dictated by their Svedberg coefficients. This effects a separation of particles of different shape and size. Our theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate the viability of using centrifugation to shape-separate a mixture of colloidal particles.